1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus for analyzing texts, an information processing method of analyzing texts, and a program for enabling a computer to carry out such an information processing method.
2. Description of the Related Art
When a company develops a new commercial product, it usually conducts a survey on the impressions that consumers have about the product and uses the information of the survey in developing a next commercial product. According to the survey, the company typically sends postal cards with questionnaires to consumers to collect feedback from the consumers about the commercial product, and gives giveaways to those consumers who have sent back the postal cards and have been chosen by a lottery.
With the widespread use in recent years of networks including the Internet, consumers are now likely to comment in their own blogs or other people's blogs on their impressions about commercial products. In addition, not only the consumers' impressions, but also the impressions of journalists from media such as newspapers and magazines are carried by columns in websites run by the media.
Therefore, companies are conjuring up ways of retrieving product impressions from texts including blogs run by individuals and articles produced by media. There have been developed many processes for automatically extracting reputation information, i.e., information about the evaluations of commercial products, with information processing apparatus. For example, JP-A No. 2007-172179 discloses a process for extracting reputation information in the form of a pair of expressions, i.e., an attribute expression and an evaluation expression. There is also known a process of visualizing reputation information about a single commercial product with a radar chart or a map diagram.
Hereinafter, a positive expression that is an expression representative of a commercial product evaluated as a positive image will be referred to as “positive” or “positive opinion”, and a negative expression that is an expression representative of a commercial product evaluated as a negative image will be referred to as “negative” or “negative opinion”.
The ratio between positive opinions and negative opinions is visualized as a circular graph or a band graph. The ratio between positive opinions and negative opinions will hereinafter be referred to as a “positive/negative ratio”.
As described above, the result of a reputation analysis of a single commercial product is visualized by a circular graph or a band graph which indicates a positive/negative ratio. However, there has not been known in the art anything which shows a visualization of the result of a comparison between a plurality of commercial products, using texts disclosed on networks or texts stored in terminals or servers. In particular, no visualizing process has been available in the art for clarifying specific features and differentiating points of positives and negatives about each of a plurality of commercial products.